We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Anti-globalizers fail to look at the world in an aggregate way. Instead, they base their beliefs on anecdotal evidence. They find a worker in a factory who has been badly treated and blame this on globalization, and label all factories producing for Western companies as sweatshops. But they turn a blind eye to the big picture. They do not see the effect of inward investment in creating competition for labour, which pushes up wages and conditions. They do not know why the Asian Tigers are now rich. They do not see the economic growth rates of those countries – like India – who have liberalized, believing that globalization simply produces poverty. Indeed, they tend not to use any aggregate data at all. Because the big picture does not fit in their worldview, they junk it. They stick their fingers in their ears and then continue to argue against globalization with anecdotes.
The anti-globalizers are very good at confusing capitalism with absence of capitalism. They point to countries which have not liberalized and are therefore poor, and then blame this poverty on globalization. Because the facts do not fit their worldview, the facts must be wrong.
They want those in poor countries to become rich but without making the same ‘mistakes’ as Western countries. To the extent they support trade, it is a very odd form of trade. It involves people doing exactly the same type of work as their ancestors did, but with the wages being higher. They regard trade as a redistributive process rather than as a way of creating wealth. They do not see how wealth creation is anything more than a capitalist myth – after all, they say, we live in a finite world. All the evidence for the existence of wealth creation is ignored, because their worldview is trapped by the Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy.
The anti-globalizers claim that the environment is getting worse. But the facts are not on their side. They look at the roads in London, see lots of cars and say that air pollution is getting worse and worse. They fail to look at the data – they do not need to because their worldview tells them that the environment is getting worse. The data however shows that the air quality in London is the cleanest since records began in 1585. On most measures, the environment is getting better.
Nevertheless, in the name of helping the environment, they promote the idea of a future Britain where we all live simpler lives, use local currencies, work locally and buy from local organic farmers. They have a romantic image of the Middle Ages economy, with people all happier, picking buttercups in the fields. They completely ignore that the economy of the Middle Ages was nasty and oppressive for the majority of those living under it, where people died at a young age. They fail to grasp that with wealth comes the ability to solve environmental problems. Instead they prefer to oppose the creation of wealth.
The anti-globalization movement is intellectually bankrupt. It is capable of shouting slogans and protesting international meetings. But in terms of providing solutions to the world’s problems, it has nothing to offer.
This list is getting quite a bit of attention. It is a report of some of the many things that Jay Rosen talked about when being interviewed by a guy from the BBC:
– Political attacks seeking to discredit the press and why they’re intensifying
– Scandals in the news business and the damage they are sowing
– The era of greater transparency and what it’s doing to modern journalism
– Trust in the mainstream media and what’s happening to it
– Bloggers, their role in politics, their effect on the press: their significance
– How the Net explosion is changing the relationship between people and news
– The collapse of traditional authority in journalism and what replaces it
– Amateurs vs. professionals; distributed knowledge vs. credentialed expertise
– The entrance of new players of all kinds in presidential campaigning
– The producer revolution underway among former consumers of media
– Jon Stewart and why he seems to be more credible to so many
– “He said, she said, we said” and why it’s such an issue this year
– The “reality-based community” thesis and the Bush Administration
– The political divide and the passions it has unleashed this year
– Why the culture war keeps going, this year reaching the mainstream press
– Why periods of intense partisanship coincide with high involvement
– The problem of propaganda and the intensity of its practice in 2004
– Why argument journalism is more involving than the informational kind
– Assaults on the very idea of a neutral observer, a disinterested account
– And then there’s this: the separate realities of Bush and Kerry supporters
I think that there is one huge thought missing from this list, so huge, and so completely in the faces of both the people having this conversation that they both missed it. Jay Rosen did anyway. This is: that these two people were talking to each other from opposite sides of an ocean.
The internet has taken politics global. The row about the Guardian trying to influence the US election by getting Guardian-readers to send pontificatory emails to the voters of Ohio is only so visible because it was so funny, but in a quieter way, the Guardian is now influencing US elections, by the simple fact of it publishing its stuff online, and Americans (and everyone else) being able to read it all, quickly and cheaply.
Another version of this same fact is the way that the Bush supporters in the USA took great heart from, and accused their local mainstream media of downplaying, the result of the recent Australian election. → Continue reading: New realities – separate realities
This morning I was left deep in thought after a seemingly innocuous article in Scientific American about Ebola vaccines. It sent me off into a bit of internal philosophizing. I have long intended to explicate a particular set of thoughts here but have never quite found the time. I do not have it right now either, but will nonetheless dedicate an hour to it. The day it deserves will never come.
There are three worlds. Not worlds in the sense of planets or matter but of realities. The first one is the world as it is. You may subdivide it any way you wish, but no matter what you do, there is still a here and now and all of the events unfolding as we speak. Whether we can understand or agree upon the details of the objective reality of this instant makes no particular difference to my thesis.
Second is the world of dreams. The one across the dream bridge. The one of our imaginations. The place where all Utopias exist and prosper. The place where perfection is possible and things just work themselves out according to great visions.
Third and last is the world of becoming. It is the first world of tomorrow or the day after that or the century after that. It is one which will one day be an objective reality on which philosophers will debate.
→ Continue reading: Three worlds
I was at the University of Paisley last week debating the subject of free trade. One of the other speakers was Martin Meteyard, Chair of CafeDirect plc, a corporation which sells ‘fair trade’ coffee. He had brought with him a packet of Mexican ‘fair trade’ coffee which he proudly showed to the audience.
I was a bit surprised that he had chosen Mexican coffee. After all, compared with other coffee producers, Mexico is a rich country. Granted, Mexico’s wealth is not at British levels. But with a per capita GDP of $8900, the country is considerably better off that other coffee producers like Kenya ($1100), Uganda ($1200) and Tanzania ($600).
Mexico also has much better trading terms than other coffee producers. It is part of the North American Free Trade Area and has a free-trade agreement with the European Free Trade Area (and thus the EU). Industry accounts for 36% of the economy and services 69%. Only 5% of Mexico’s economy is agricultural.
The fundamental problem in the coffee industry worldwide is that there is too much production. This means that the price is low. What is needed is for people to exit the market, and in Mexico it is easier than anywhere else to turn your back on coffee – after all, agriculture accounts for only 5% of the economy. (Yet, according to CafeDirect, 25% of ‘fair trade’ coffee comes from Mexico.) Is CafeDirect really engaging in a great moral act by helping Mexicans stay in the market?
Paying a few pence extra for a cup of ‘fair trade’ Mexican coffee might make you feel like a better person. Unfortunately, how you feel does not make the world a better place.
Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D’Afrique under General D’Allonville).
The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped “Here goes the last of the Brudenells”, his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).
Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.
Portable phones are wonderful things, but not, it is widely agreed, wholly wonderful.
Have you ever been at something like a church service or a classical music concert, and found your attention diverted by portable phones ringing?
Help is at hand.
MONTERREY, Mexico – It was the reporters who noticed first. Unable to call their editors while covering the weddings of the rich and famous, they asked the priest why their cell phones never worked at Sacred Heart. His reply: Israeli counterintelligence.
In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the Madonna and statues of the saints.
The jarring polychromatic din of ringing cell phones is increasingly being thwarted – from religious sanctuaries to India’s parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains – by devices originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart phone-triggered bombings.
Jamming other people’s portable phones is one of many practices where you need strong property rights in place to enable disputes about the rights and wrongs of it to be easily decided. But even in an age of weakened property rights, this device will surely prove to be a great boon in protecting the rest of us from compulsive communicators and their irritating noises.
Human problems are hard to fix. So instead, fix the machines they are using to cause the problem.
This being Sunday, let us turn our minds towards matters otherworldly. Today’s Telegraph contains this devilishly diverting story:
Chris Cranmer, a naval technician serving on the Type 22 frigate Cumberland, has been officially recognised as a Satanist by the ship’s captain. That allows him to perform Satanic rituals aboard and permits him to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan should he be killed in action.
My immediate reaction was, of course: What the hell is the world coming to? But thinking about it some more, I reckon that a Satanist would be able to throw himself into a battle at least as enthusiastically as your average Christian.
A spokesman for the Royal Navy – echoing that Rowan Atkinson Church of England Bishop, who noted the forces of good, and of evil, and who said that the role of the Church of England is to strike a balance between the two – assures us that all is well:
A spokesman for the Royal Navy insisted that Mr Cranmer’s unconventional beliefs would not cause problems on board ship. “We are an equal opportunities employer and we don’t stop anybody from having their own religious values,” he said.
The report ends with this further quote from the same source:
“Nobody is suggesting there is anything at all dark about this.”
Perish the thought.
If Moses had turned right instead of left, the Jews could have had the oil, and the Arabs would have got the oranges.
– Harry Hutton
So hapless Prince Harry takes a swing at some paparazzo who bashes him in the face with a camera, and the British press have apoplexy tut-tutting over his behaviour.
To use internet parlance, WTF? If some pushy bastard negligently clips you in the mouth with a camera whilst in search of a few quid, the correct response is to return the favour with interest. That is not ill-advised or thuggish or incorrect, it is an entirely appropriate means of male-to-male comminication at such a time. I am glad to see that there is a member of the royal family who actually has personality traits that approach those of the Crown’s normal everyday subjects.
It seem quite appropriate that not only should he not apologise for his reaction to the incident, he should be advising Christopher Uncle that if there is a next time, there should be some expectations of a royal boot in the bollocks as well.
Earlier this week I received a telephone call at work which left me trembling with rage and disgust. Had I been asked to make a donation to Hamas or buy a Michael Moore DVD? Had a born-again Christian harangued me about my evil atheist views? Was I trying to get some data from our Paris office? Had I been told that my soccer team, Ipswich Town Football Club, was about to be merged with Norwich City FC?
No, it was none of these things. I had just been lectured about what I should consider paying for a house by a early twentysomething estate agent.
Now, like a lot of people, I realise that the process of buying a home can be stressful. I work in the London financial market, which is a pretty stressful place full of aggressive folk and also some of the smartest, nicest folk around, too. In my decade or more of working here, though, I have never encountered such a rancid mix of rudeness, patronising attitude, overlaying a rather obvious desire to grab my money as fast as possible. A very British set of character failings, in fact.
During my recent and wonderful trip to the United States, I used to chuckle at some of the real estate advertisements, with expressions such as “We don’t just sell houses, we sell dreams.” Smug Brits may laugh at such cheesy imagery and words, but frankly, I will settle for a bit of American cheesiness and cheery good manners over the British alternative every time.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
– from So Long, and Thanks for all the Fsh by Douglas Adams.
(We miss you Douglas)
Blogging may be a bit light tonight (or not) as there is a Samizdata.net Blogger Bash at Samizdata HQ tonight…
We shall be trying to impress a certain Texan blogger with Chili Con Chelsea!
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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